Our Fitness Blog

Four of the Most Common Diet Mistakes

We have all been there. We try and try to lose those excess pounds, but they just won't come off. We may think that there is a shortcut or a fast and easy solution. If we just cut out this one certain type of food or take this pill, then everything will work itself out. However, this is just not the case. You have to put in a lot of hard work and do your research to properly understand how to reach your weight loss goals. There are a lot of mistakes that we can make along the way, but this is why we have to do our research and talk with trained professionals before we become disgruntled with our results. Here we will take a look at four of the most common weight loss mistakes.

Crash diets

Many women turn to crash dieting in order to lose weight. They like to think that if they limit the amount of food they eat or only eat certain types of food, they can easily drop those pounds. However, this is not the case, and crash diets can wreak havoc on your health. They can cause nutritional deficiencies, not to mention damage to your kidneys, brain, heart and other organs. It can cause you to lose muscle mass and slow your metabolism. If you frequently crash diet for long periods of time your metabolism will be extremely slow, and once you start eating again you will gain back the weight you lost and then some.

Diet pills

This is another common cure all for weight loss that women seem to love. For some reason we are always looking for that one wonder drug that will magically make all of our fat melt away. However, most of us come to find out that after spending tons and tons of money on these little wonder drugs that they do not work. Many of them have also been proven to cause many dangerous side effects. So, we end up not losing any weight, wasting money and endangering our health all because we thought we could lose weight the easy way.

Paying too much attention to the scale

A lot of us do this. We exercise, then we hop right on the scale to weigh ourselves. All we have to do is look in the mirror, take before and after pictures or look at our dress size to see a difference. However, we seem to ignore these and go right for the scale. We need to remember that the scale is not the end all to our workout routines. A scale can only show so much. You need to look at the entire picture. You may not see the scale moving, but you may still feel healthier and have a better toned body. So, stop paying so much attention to the scale and start looking at your body.

Piling on the cardio

When people think about exercising to lose weight, they immediately think they need to up their cardio. While cardio is a great addition to any fitness routine, you need to add other types of exercises to get the most out of your workouts. If you want to lose fat and also tone, you need to focus on strength and increase your metabolism. Resistance training and interval training are more effective than cardio at doing this. Try adding some planks, burpees or push ups to your routine to see how much faster the weight will come off and how toned your body will become.

It does not have to be a long journey to lose those excess pounds, if you do not give in to those weight loss “shortcuts”. If you do, you’re always starting over. Do it the smart, healthy way, and the weight will come off and STAY off.